Abstract
This chapter critically reexamines current claims about the diversity of ontological orientations among human societies, while revisiting work on linguistic relativity—the social construction of such lived-realities by means of the symbolism of everyday language. Thus, throughout the Pacific Northwest animals and plants think, as portrayed in popular songs and folktales. No sharp line is drawn between animals and humans, and humans owe a huge debt to their spiritual progenitors among other life-forms. At stake here are current claims about the diversity of ontological orientations among human societies, along with classic claims about linguistic relativity, or the social construction of such lived-realities by means of the symbolism of everyday language: in particular poetry and music as pan-human ways of “painting” mental imagery with ordinary sound.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
On the other hand, one may wish to see this split as an instance of late-stage animism, with a split between animals and humans, who emerged from the same spiritual substance, only recently taking on different bodies, with different linguistic capacities; see Descola 1996 [1986]. But here, I think, we are splitting hairs. There is still a split, an ontological divide, at least in NW California.
- 2.
The same pattern is observed in Basque, a mysterious isolate somewhat demystified by Frank (2018, cf. note on p. 202 therein).
References
Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle: Revised Oxford Translation, vols. 1–2, ed. Johathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Austin, John. 1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by Mikhail Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Basso, Keith. 1996. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Becker, Alton L., and Aram A. Yengoyan. 1979. The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Company.
Boas, Franz. 2017 [1911]. Introduction to Handbook of American Indian Languages, ed. Preston Holder, with a new introduction by Michael Silverstein. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. New York: Harper & Row.
De Saussure, Ferdinand. 2000 [1916]. Course in General Linguistics, trans. from the French by Roy Harris. London: Open Court.
Deacon, Terrance. 2012. Incomplete Nature: How the Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: Norton.
Descartes, René. 1988. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols., trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Descola, Philippe. 1996 [1986]. In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture, translated from the French by Janet Lloyd, with a Foreword by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press [Originally Published in 2005].
Dundes, Alan. 1980. Interpreting of Folklore. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.
Frank, Roslyn. 2018. Looking at Europe Through a Basque Lens: Ethnolinguistic Considerations of Two Worldviews. Etnolingwistyka 30: 189–213. https://doi.org/0000-0002-2472-0091.
Frey, Rodney. 2017. Carry Forth the Stories: An Ethnographer’s Journey into Native Oral Tradition. Pullman: Washington State University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 2017 [1973]. Interpretation of Cultures, with a foreword by Robert Darnton. New York: Basic Books.
Hale, Kenneth. 1973. A Note on Subject-Object Inversion. In Issues in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Henry and Renee Kahone, ed. Braj Kachru, 300–310. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Hallowell, A. Irving. 1947. Myth, Culture, and Personality. American Anthropologist 49 (4): 544–556.
Hauck, Jan D., and Guilherme O. Heurich. 2018. Language in the Amerindian Imagination: An Inquiry into Linguistic Natures. Language & Communication 63: 1–8.
Heidegger, Martin. 1978 [1927]. Being and Time, trans. from the German by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Hill, Jane H. 2001. Languages on the Land. In Archeology, Language, and History, ed. John E. Terrell, 257–282. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey.
Hymes, Dell. 1966. Two Types of Linguistic Relativity (with Examples from Amerindian Ethnography). In Sociolinguistics: Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference, 1964, ed. William Bright, 114–157. The Hague: Mouton.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Leavitt, John. 2011. Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity in Modern Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. Totemism, trans. from the French by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press.
McWhorter, John H. 2014. The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language. New York: Oxford University Press.
O’Neill, Sean. 2008. Cultural Contact and Linguistic Relativity Among the Indians of Northwestern California. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow and Company.
Sacks, Oliver. 2008. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. Revised and Expanded. New York: Vintage Books.
Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Sapir, Edward. 1985 [1949]. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir on Language, Culture, and Personality, ed. David Mandelbaum; with a new Introduction by Dell Hymes. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Sapir, Edward. 2001. Northwest California Linguistics, ed. Victor Golla and Sean O’Neill. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Silverstein, Michael. 1979. Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology. In The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, ed. Paul R. Clyne, William F. Hanks, and Carol L. Hofbauer, 193–247. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Silverstein, Michael. 1981. The Limits of Awareness. Sociolinguistic Working Paper 84. Southwest Educational Development Laboratory, Austin, TX.
Silverstein, Michael. 2000. Whorfianism and the Linguistic Imagination of Nationality. In Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Paul Kroskrity, 85–138. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Tylor, Edward Burnett. 1871. Primitive Culture: Research into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom. London: John Murray.
von Humboldt, Wilhelm. 1999 [1836]. On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and Its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species, ed. Michael Losonsky. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Witherspoon, Keith. 1977. Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Yelle, Robert. 2013. Semiotics of Religion: Signs of the Sacred in History. Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics. London: Bloomsbury.
Acknowledgments and Dedication
To begin, I would like to thank Jan Hauck and Guilherme Heurich for inviting me to give a talk on this subject at Oxford University in the fall of 2018, and for giving me stimulating feedback along the way, pushing me to think more deeply about these critical questions in this area: ontology, relativity, and Indigenous models of reality, including language. There’s still so much more for all of us to say! I would also like to thank Michael Silverstein for his generous feedback over the years, particularly concerning the Boasian legacy in linguistic anthropology, along with the question of Whorfianism in particular, based on his own sweeping contributions and his profound knowledge of philosophical debates in this area. This paper is dedicated to the memory of the late Aram A. Yengoyan (1936–2017), my mentor for many years, who cared deeply about human diversity and whose deepest intellectual commitments flowed from his heartfelt defense of human differences—aesthetic, philosophical, ontological, ethical, and otherwise.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Neill, S. (2019). Linguistic Relativity in the Age of Ontology: How Language Shapes Worldview and Ways of Being, Even Going Beyond the Human. In: Głaz, A. (eds) Languages – Cultures – Worldviews. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28509-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28509-8_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-28508-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-28509-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)